The Memories of No One
by earan
Summary: Tetra has no place in the memories of the living in this world of vast ocean. Oneshot.


**The Memories of No One**

**By Earan**

**Disclaimer:**__All characters belong to Nintendo.

In ancient stories, princesses had long, silky dresses of ivory and rosy shades with curtains of silver hair that swirled about their bodies like ribbons.

It was poetic. It was the kind of beauty that made one drop their jaw when seeing a stretch of sky framing mountains in the distance, an area where the ocean could not touch – a green that refused to be mixed in with the blue vastness of ocean. An autonomous green. In this world of ocean and nothing more, green was beautiful. It was rare. Islands of trees were havens. Green stood in its own place, lived within its own existence, as if it was unaware of the blue that swallowed the world outside it – blithely unaware of its dominance.

That kind of naivety was charming.

The rare green took form in a boy. Literally. He pranced around clad in green fearlessly – though, almost _too_ fearlessly – sometimes getting into trouble, but most of the time succeeding. Despite his Courage, it wasn't the divinely-blessed bravery or the stuff of ancient knights that were to owe for his heroism, but that naïve sense of childish innocence that made him invincible against the horrors he had to confront.

Even through the monsters and Ganondorf and seeing the King of Red Lions drown into blankness before his very eyes, he remained a kid, truly guileless in every sense of the word.

When the dormant Wisdom in her awakened from its hibernation, she lost that thing that made Link special. She lost the thing that had, up until this point, sheltered her from the pessimism of the world as it protected him still.

This thing had differed from his from the beginning. For her, it was the endless hunt for treasure, the harmless yet amusing raids into small villages, and the throwing of anchors into harbours. It was the utter sense of freedom of leading a ship to anywhere. For him, it was the comforts of a little sister and Grandma's soup. He still had his childhood. She envied him for it. When Wisdom awakened, she lost her childhood – and she couldn't go back. Not after she had seen the light.

In ancient stories, princesses had crowns. They looked beautiful with translucent skin as if they were statues carved by the Goddesses themselves. It was as if no amount of dirt or rolling around in battlefields against bad guys would taint their perfectness.

She was no image of a princess, with her cheap pirate garb and tanned skin. She was loud, ungraceful, and sat with her legs open. She bossed her crew around with the pompousness that paralleled the poise of the princesses in those stories, and she certainly never took care of her own blond princess hair – which, as a result, framed her head like a wig of hay as opposed to the impression of silky, silvery hair in the stories.

The most poetic thing about her was that she was a princess without a crown, a princess without a kingdom. That, at least, she shared with the King of Red Lions. Royalty without the state. For that, she was in limbo.

Not Link. He had a straightforward role. Normal kid with sister. Place normal kid in scheme of destiny. Have him fulfill it. The end.

For her, it was much more complicated. She was a princess. Her line had been hidden, the country that gave her noble blood authority faded into the memories of no one. She was a princess, but of nothing. The Princess of Nothing.

So arguably, she was not even a princess at all. She was just a pirate. A law-elusive, crime-chasing pirate, who got her thrills from nothing more complex than stealing someone's valued treasure, regardless of whether it was useful to her or not. She was just a slightly fancier thief than most, a water-riding kleptomaniac.

So, how did someone like her end up being a princess? Princesses were regal, sophisticated, and elegant in every way. They were the image of the Goddesses: a quiet grace radiated from them. Not her. Definitely not her.

So whenever Link happened to cross paths with her, it was surprising. Green was a rarity in a world consumed by the vicious ocean – the tidal waves, the tsunamis that consumed land like a starved young'un. Green was rare, and it made her feel like she had stumbled upon something that gave her faded royalty some kind of authenticity.

Despite his confrontations with the monsters and Ganondorf and fading away from the drowning Hyrule King, Link smiled at her, going on about his days as any kid his age would do. It made her feel royal. Like a true princess of noble blood.

Special, even. Not just a dirty, purposeless pirate.

She envied this naivety about him. In so many ways, it protected him from the horrors of the night that haunted her, from having never known the kingdom she had lost. It protected him from the nightmares of the Hyrule below them, the ghosts of the past clawing at her in the sea above, dragging her through the dark waters like ballerinas in a locked dance to where sunlight could no longer penetrate. There, in the nightmares, at the bottom of the sea, she always drowned with them.

She was Princess of Nothing, royal to no one. Only he knew, but above the dead kingdom, the title meant nothing. Up there in the seas, she was the pirate and he was the irrationally heroic kid. 'Princess of Hyrule' and 'Hero of Winds' were not legends to be passed in their time while they lived.

She was a princess in the memories of faded winds, to the memories of no one in particular.


End file.
